


For the Greater Good

by Control_Room, Random_ag



Series: Tortured Tales [7]
Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: A House Inspired By HH Holmes' Murder Hotel, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Being Chased, Blood Drinking, Gen, Horror, Implied Cannibalism, Pursuit, probable trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Control_Room/pseuds/Control_Room, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Random_ag/pseuds/Random_ag
Summary: This house is not very welcoming.The host is, in all the wrong ways.
Relationships: Marina Kidd/Linda Stein
Series: Tortured Tales [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2023520





	For the Greater Good

“Can you hurry up?” Gonner grunted, struggling with her friend and sister’s weight. “I can’t hold you both up much longer. Thaische, get the darn window open already.”

“One moment.” Thaische replied, hands trying to grip on their supposed entrance, fumbling with the latch as the base beneath them wobbled. “Just. One. Moment.”

“It's been ‘one moment’ for five minutes!” Marina barked. “One moment, one moment, finish it already!”

“You're bothering me.”

The young woman looked at them utterly betrayed: “I most certainly am _not!”_ she hissed, pushing them upwards slightly and causing their already flimsy balance to nearly collapse. “ _You_ are the one taking absolutely _forever!”_

“Hey, hey! Watch it! How old are you guys, five? Linda, stop laughing! Help me out!”

“I am helping,” Linda insisted lazily, maintaining the steady stream of ink that swirled around the three person stack, keeping them upright. “It’s not so easy to keep this up, you know.”

“I’ll show you what’s not so easy to keep up, you thrice blasted-”

Gonner’s insult was cut short by a curt, “Got it.”

“Get in, then!” Gonner gasped, on the verge of falling over. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this and hold both of you up.”

Thaische nimbled their way in without making much noise, almost materializing on the wooden floor. Marina had a slightly harder time - perhaps because she insisted on using a good part of her precious breath to insistently whisper: “You _gotta_ teach me one day.” during her entrance. “That way we won’t lose so much time _waiting_ for you to open it.” 

Thaische looked around. The floor was paved with an olive green wood, a rather uncommon choice of color. It felt unnerving in a moldy, uncomfortable way they could not exactly place. Marina decided it must look better in the daytime and was a way to get inhabitants to go to sleep, as the color was positively atrocious.

“I have no idea how I do that.” Thaische eventually whispered back. Marina stuck out her tongue and unraveled the rope from her belt, pulling up Gonner and then Linda, giving her wife a dip and a kiss as she came through the window. 

“This place is….” Linda began, then a shiver cut her off. Marina offered, “Weird?”

“No, no,” Linda frowned. “It’s… oh, I don’t know, it’s just plain _wrong_.”

“Horrid design.” Thaische offered. “Worse colors.”

“What are we looking for in here?” Gonner asked, bringing the other three back on track 

“Oh, uh… it was a… diamond?” Marina narrowed her eyes as she struggled to recall: ”I clearly remember the diamond part.”

“A raw diamond?” Linda questioned, then corrected herself. “Diamond in the rough. That’s what Eska said, right.”

“Specifically a _rose_ of a diamond in the rough.” Gonner added, wrinkling her nose with the specifics. “Whatever that means. You know, now that I think about it, you could have asked your brother what he exactly meant by that, so we wouldn’t have to overturn this whole place to find it.”

“He said it already. Rose diamond.” Thaische replied as they began moving forward, exploring this sickly green mansion.

“Yeah, but did he mean a rose shaped like a diamond, or a diamond shaped like a rose, or a pink diamond?” Marina argued with her friend. “Or something else entirely?”

“First one we find.”

“What if we find all of them?”

“Take all.”

“... I guess that is a solution. Whoever owns this place seems to be filthy rich, anyways….”

“Then let’s find whatever it is right now,” Linda shivered again, sidling closer to Marina to keep away from the walls. “I really don’t like being here.”

“He said to look in violet,” Thaische remarked. Creeping through the halls, Gonner illuminated him with a soft red light, the orangish glow reflecting around its green environment. Her cane slid soundlessly against the floor. They paused, frowning, and tapped on a spot. Thaische’s eyes narrowed as the sound echoed slightly beneath the four of them. “It’s hollow.”

“The floor?” Gonner inquired, glancing around with worry. Thaische nodded in confirmation. “That’s… that’s not good. Let’s get to wherever ‘violet’ is and get the hell out of here.”

“Maybe it's got to do with the floor?” Marina tried, face screwing in thought. “This one is green all over, I wouldn't put it past the owner to make another poor design choice.”

“It’s not so bad,” Linda remarked in an attempt to make herself feel better about their surroundings, tiptoeing around. “But yes, I think it has to do with the colors. Should we try up or down?”

Gonner followed her, deep in thought. 

“I'd say up,” she concluded, “If whoever made this house modeled it after the way light breaks.” 

“Well, let's hope they did.” Marina murmured. She eyed the stairs down the hall to their left: her friend, wife and sister followed her without a word as she rose to an indigo-paved floor. The stairs ended there, and glancing around, Linda realized the next stairs were located elsewhere, and recalled that there had been no downward stairs on their path up. Come to think of it, there did not seem to be many stairs despite the building being so big. It appeared to be built more like a labyrinthine cage than an actual inhabitable house. Marina gave a quiet chuckle, wrapping her hand around Linda’s. “I hate this!”

Thaische hummed in grim agreement.

The stairs turned out to be located on what at least seemed to be the other end of the floor - again, only an upward path: no sign of another way to descend.

“Getting a lot of steps in,” Gonner tried to joke. She shivered, turning around sharply, her red light illuminating an empty hall. “I thought I heard something. Ok, let’s hurry up, find what we need and get the absolute hell out of here.”

They all let out a collective breath of relief when the next floor they entered had soft lilac hues, violet bursts and a relieving feeling of calm. 

“This is the floor, at least,” Marina pointed out. “Split up and search?” 

Thaische did not quite wait for an answer, opening the first door available to them and entering to search it without much fanfare. The Kidd sisters and Linda took that as their cue to go ahead and start inspecting the many, many, many rooms - if behind the doors there even were rooms. Gonner opened one to find it took to a wall, and Marina nearly fell down five stories when one opened to a two by two pit straight down to what looked like a grassy patch on the ground far beneath.

Linda's door led to… a corridor. With more doors. She swore under her breath, again wishing they had not accepted Eska’s request or at least that the boy would have been more specific. 

She sighed.

Find the thing. Just. Find the damn thing. FInd the thing and go home. It was an easy job.

The first ten or so doors were false leads, either going to a room lacking any diamonds or roses, especially no rose diamonds. Then, finally, stumbling into another hall, she saw a dim light at the end streaming out from under a door. Though her instincts spoke against opening a door in a house she was trying to burgle with a light on, something about the way the light was had piqued her curiosity.

Very carefully, she approached the room and quietly twisted the doorknob, peeking in with her head.

There was… a child, reading an enormous book on his bed in an octagonal room. His tiny size seemed to be all the more diminutive from the size of the bed, which was clearly a queen, and the absolutely massive book he held, about the size of what was visible of the child, made it almost comical to behold. He fixed his ruby eyes on her as she glanced at a hexagonal clock, his gaze completely calm, as if the thought of a stranger in his bedroom at three o’five in the morning was far from the most frightening thing his mind could conjure. A small lamp lit up his ink blue hair and the rest of the room, nearly all of its furnishings shades of violet.

“Hello.” he said quietly, his soft voice melodious.

Linda stared for a couple seconds, dumbfounded. “Hello.” she finally replied.

“Why are you here?”

“I am, uh… looking for a ‘rose diamond’, specifically in the rough, if you know anything about… whatever that is.”

The little boy looked absolutely bamboozled. 

“M’papa and Madre don’t keep d-diamonds in the house, ‘cept the kind on his scalpels.”

Great. 

“Do they have maybe… special roses in the house?” she tried instead.

“N-not inside. And nothin’ special….”

That settled it. She was going to _kill_ both of them - Thaische for sending them on a goose chase in a nightmare mansion and Eska for wanting something that did not exist.

“You should run.” 

“What?” the child’s words snapped her out of her rage. “Excuse me?”

“You and your friends should run. All four of you. His hearing is better than m-mine, and he d-doesn’t sleep much either… your best chance is t-to get out before it’s too late.”

Linda paled. Whatever on Earth was happening or about to happen, she had no interest in seeing unfold: now more than ever she desperately wanted to get the hell out of that house immediately. She looked at the child once more, weighed her options first, then his; finally, concluding that a lifetime in such a horrid place would have brought nothing but trouble, she gently held him to her chest and made a run for the main corridor.

Marina was just coming out of yet another empty room when her wife barged in with a toddler in her arms, saying urgently: “We gotta get out. _Now_!”

“What the hell is happening?” she asked, utterly confused. Marina looked back and forth between Linda and the boy, who seemed just as bewildered, his small arms unable to go around the whole of the book he held. Linda tried to balance him on one hip and grab her wife's arm to pull her towards the stairs in a panic: “We're being hunted! Where’s Gonner and Thaische?” 

As if on cue, Gonner materialized a few doors down, having heard Linda’s stealthy sprint.

“Keep it down!” Gonner hissed, then froze as she saw the child. “Did you wake him up?”

“No, and this place is worse than we thought,” Linda replied. “We’re leaving, asap. Thaische?”

“I can hear them humming down there….”

Marina’s voice died in her throat as she said the last word. They all listened in perfect silence.

Thaische did not hum songs often.

And even when they did, they did not sound like that.

“Th-that’s… That’s my father,” the child told them, eyes wide and mouth twitching into a hysterical smile.

Gonner turned slowly. Thaische's glowing eyes replied to her stare, wide, unnerved. Their hand outstretched, they pointed to the stairs.

They ran towards them almost in unison, the hollow floor thundering beneath their steps.

A door slammed open from behind them just as they were all on the stairs, and they nearly fell down the steps all together. The blue pavement met their loud, uncoordinated escape as they scrambled to reach the other end of the building, and they might have reached it if halfway through a silhouette had not popped out of another room to stand in their way, glasses glinting in the faint light like fangs of a cunning, ruthless beast as its head shifted slowly to look at them. The boy clutched his large book tighter between his little fists; Linda held him closer to herself as she quickly retreated into a nearby door Marina was ushering everybody inside of, after having checked there was no pitfall nor wall behind it, hoping there would be something in it able to buy them some time.

Gonner shoved her sister inside just in time. She felt something lay on her shoulder for a second, and then a piercing pain shot from it straight into her brain; she cried out as her knees buckled under the pain and she found her body sustained only by the fingers sunk into her shoulder.

“Good morning, young Miss Kidd.” a horrifyingly charming voice crooned above her. Her milky eyes met the inscrutable screen of a pair of glasses and two candid rows of teeth. They were rotating slowly, head tilting with what seemed like methodical precision into a position that was not meant to be achieved by a human neck.

The face leaned forward to better inspect her; the hand on her shoulder did not yank her, but she could not escape its immovable grip no matter how much she struggled against it.

“What might you be doing in my humble abode this early?” the lips moved slowly, their movements so natural yet so eerily plastic and fake the closer they came to Gonner's face. ”Surely you’re in no need nor want of a doctor, seeing as you entered through the second floor window.”

“HANDS OFF OF HER, BITCH!”

The voice coming from the trap door (hidden in the supposed a safe room, pointed out by the child in a hushed and hoarse voice) opening from down the hall was Marina's; the body that slammed head first into the man's side, freeing Gonner from his clutch and splatting him against the wall, was Thaische's.

“My _dear_ child!” the man, seemingly limbless, snapped upright like a rubber band released from two fingers, and with a smooth motion, lifted Thaische off the floor, holding them at arm’s length like one might restrain a swamp adder. “Why, may I ask, did you do that?”

They bared their teeth at him like their brother had taught them, legs kicking and spit building between their jaws to land onto his face. Gonner, finally snapping out of her terrified trance, kicked the man’s leg - and felt naught but a sense of wrong as his knee seemed to go the opposite direction to bear the blow, bending effortlessly and with a fluid painlessness. Throwing Thaische onto Marina, who was charging towards him (making both drop like bowling pins), he surveyed the young folk in his home like a lion might survey a flock of zebra. 

His spectacled glare stopped on the small child safely tucked away in Linda's arms; his serene grin grew larger without opening perhaps in anger, or possibly, terribly, in amusement.

“Try not to run too much,” he commented, turning around and vanishing behind a door, his voice echoing after himself. “Tension so ruins the tenderness.”

Marina, in heated anger, shoved her friend off of her to flung open the closing door and came face to face with a wall. 

“I hate this, I hate this, I hate this,” she growled, backing away. She swiveled to face the child, gently placing her hands on his shoulders. “Kid. Where’s the fastest way out of here?”

He looked at her with moderate confusion. 

“Not the stairs,” he said politely.

“Gotcha. Where to, then?”

“Third left.”

Marina ruffled his hair, helped her sister and Thaische up, and stormed in the designated room. “And now we go...?”

“Down. Under carpet.”

And under the carpet they went. They followed the child's instructions through the fourth and third floor, making haste to the next room or secret passage each time they could hear the head of the house hum too close for comfort. Despite their nonlinear almost looping path, they could feel they were advancing quickly.

Each time a room or passage led to a bifurcation, the child would point them in the right direction with a hushed whisper and a helpful hand pointing towards the right road. As they exited what seemed like the millionth door, however, he fell silent. His eyes fixed on a wall, ears tilting in what would have been an adorable gesture in less stressful situations, in part puzzled and in part, most concerningly, worried.

“There w- was a door t-there.” he murmured, glancing up at Linda with massive eyes. Were his eyes ever smaller? Linda tried not to smile, then did not have to as she and Marina registered the words and simply bolted down the hallway in front of them, positively scared into flight and done with everything in god forsaken mansion of the man eating tardigrade terror, a slew of ‘nope's escaping their gritted teeth as Gonner and Thaische chased after them not to be left behind. 

They slammed a door open: before them laid a big room with a lavish dining table, two doors opposite the one they had entered from, one next to theirs, and the spectacled pursuer calmly sat at one end of the table, grinning at them as their entrance closed behind them.

“What luck!” he chuckled sensibly, “You are just in time for a chat and a meal.”

“ _FUCK_ that! Fuck it so much to hell!”Marina eloquently yelled, causing Thaische to flinch, and yanked the doorknob to go back into the corridor. The door did not budge. She tried again a couple more times to no avail; finally she turned to the man keeping them hostage, eyes wide with desperate anger. “Open the damn door.” she ordered with a hiss surprisingly icy for a pyromaniac.

The head of the manor, much like the door, did not move an inch if only to open his sharp grin, teeth gleaming in the moon and star light drifting in through clouds, falling onto the white table cloth through stained glass depictions.

“I think I shall not.” he crooned. “You’ve made yourselves at home in my sanctuary, and I think it is only right that I treat you as my guests, is it not?”

“I think you will open the goddamn door, or I'm gonna-”

The man's genuinely amused laugh interrupted the most gruesome threat as if met with a good natured joke. “Do not make promises you cannot keep, my young miss Marina. You don't really think I would be bothered by some fire, do you now? _Especially_ when one is afraid and running, they tend to drop things.”

Marina turned dark with rage as she watched him light _her_ lighter. She patted her pocket, making sure to keep her eyes on the bastard, chilled when she was certain that the one he held was hers.

“You piece of-”

“Why don't you sit down and have something?” he invited them, smiling amicably, genially. Thaische stiffened every muscle in their body like a cat poofing its fur to appear more threatening, although in their case they were determined on making so that, if they did get eaten, their flesh would have been to the bastard's teeth of the taste and consistency of a rubber tire. “Why are you all so worried? I didn’t hear an ounce of that when you crept through my window. Have a seat.”

“No.”

“I said, _have a seat_.”

Linda glanced at Gonner. They all did. Gonner, stiff, pulled out a chair directly across from him, and lowered herself into it. 

“Goodness me, I just realized I have yet to introduce myself.” he smiled at his young prisoners. He gracefully waved his fingers and a teapot appeared out of thin air: “I’m Doctor Atabulus. Charmed to meet you.”

Nobody replied. Slowly, they all mimicked Gonner's movements and sat down.

“What are you all doing with my son?”

“Your son?” Marina repeated.

“Stealing him.”

Marina elbowed Thaische in the stomach; they elbowed her back.

“Interesting.” the doctor enunciated slowly as he grinned. The child curled a little tighter into Linda's chest. “And why, may I ask? Did you intend to use him to get a wealthy ransom out of his rich parents? Because if that is the case,” a checkbook materialized in his hand, “I can spare everyone the trouble of actually kidnapping my little Johan right now.”

“We are _not_ kidnapping him!” Linda hastily corrected. “We did not come here to kidnap him. We did not.”

“Then why are you holding him?” the question was rhetorical. “Johan, aren’t you awake a little late?”

“C-couldn’t sleep,” the child mumbled. He looked at his father with large worried eyes. “Please let them go, I’m sure they won’t c-come back….”

“Hush, Johan,” Atabulus murmured, and turned back to his guests. “Now, tea, coffee?”

“Blood-” Marina elbowed Thaische again, and only hissed when they elbowed her back. Gonner yanked her sister closer to herself and shot both of them a glare to stop their tomfoolery.

“I believe I do have that, actually.” their host smiled. Johan whimpered and looked away as Atabulus poured a cup of dark maroon liquid into Thaische’s cup from the central teapot. He leaned in to tell them, “Drink up. I hope it is to your tastes.”

“Don’t drink that,” Gonner muttered to Thaische. “You have no idea where the hell he got it from.“ 

“It could be a… you know.” Marina added.

She swallowed air and her voice dropped.

“A person's.”

Thaische stared straight at Atabulus's forehead to give the impression that they were looking into his glasses. They took a quick swig of the iron-tasting liquid and spat it in his face before anybody could recoil and yell at them. The doctor's seraphic smile did not budge - it merely opened to let him lick a crimson drop of blood on his cheek. Johan whimpered into his book as Linda held him tight.

“What a waste of a perfectly good cup.” Atabulus candidly commented, using a handkerchief to wipe away the rest. “And it was made to your order, too.” 

“I'm regretting that.”

“I'd like to make an order, actually.” Marina bursted, “Yes, I think I and all of my friends would like a mug of a neat little juice called ‘you are going to let us get out of here and we are keeping the kid’, how does that sound?”

The doctor smiled. His teeth gleamed white. “That is not an option.”

“Never say not!” Gonner remarked, and snarled. She stared. Something should have happened, but Atabulus only yawned. Gonner blinked, and slumped, exhausted. “What the fuck….”

Linda desperately whispered prayers under her breath. Johan looked at her, then at the book in his hands, his tutor's lovingly hand drawn gift.

“Not an option.” Atabulus simply repeated. His tone had cooled slightly.

He could feel the panic seeping out of every last one of his prisoners’ pores, and it was just the most delightfully intoxicating thing. He felt his ceaseless hunger rumble much like a spoiled chortling baron awaiting the next course of a neverending meal.

Johan sensed it too. 

He threw the book with all his strength.

The stained glass shattered with the force, and those in the room stared at the gape. 

“Run!” Johan shrieked. Linda and Gonner snapped into action, pushing Thaische and Marina into the hole of night between shards of carefully colored glass. The four of them plus Johan jumped from the window, landing on the ground only a foot down.

Marina looked around on her still unsteady feet, head lolling almost violently left and right: the book laid a few feet from her, slightly tattered but overall safe. Thaische yanked her towards their escape vehicle - a battered old Jeep modified enough to make a Ferrari bite the dust and eat its cap in envy. Gonner and Linda with Johan had already gotten a running start towards it, dreading to even look back, and while they were sure they would have never left them to die they did silently agree they should have hurried. She did not know _how_ she had managed to grab the voluminous volume off the ground while sprinting like a maddened hare, but she _did_ , and before she could think of anything else she was squashed into the driver's seat with the engine roaring as loud as it could into her ears nearly as loud as her pulse, and they were going, going, driving away into the night as fast and as far away as possible with the new company of a large life saving book, a traumatized child and a mouth still very much tasting of likely human blood.

***

Eska turned from petting Pizzocchero on the floor to his sibling and their friends bursting through the door with the desperate relief of convicts finally seeing the light of day at the end of their hastily dug tunnel as one might have turned to a mischievous gust of wind yodeling through a hole in a window.

“Hello.” he croaked with his horrid voice. Only Thaische gave a grunt in reply. “Did you find him?”

“No… no, we didn't find it.” Marina huffed, trying to quell the adrenaline shooting through her veins. Her head shot up in realization: “Wait, _him_?”

“NO, WE DIDN'T!” Linda interrupted her wife, ink bubbling angrily around her figure, “BECAUSE _YOU_ SENT US TO AN M. C. ESCHER HOUSE OF _MURDER_ AND _DESPAIR_ WHERE THE LOCAL FRIENDLY _CANNIBAL_ TRIED TO **_EAT US_ **!”

“I have someone else's blood in my mouth.” Thaische felt the need to add, to which Gonner couldn't hold back a: “And whose fault is _that_ , huh?”

“AND WE HAD TO STEAL A **_CHILD_ ** FROM HIM!” Linda concluded, holding Johan to her chest as he clutched his copy of Faust in his thin little arms.

Eska's dull eyes lit up from behind his mask as he saw the child.

“Little rose!” he greeted sweetly.

Johan turned to him, and his ruby eyes glimmered in genuine happiness as he recognized him. He leaned towards the arms the skeletal man had opened for him as if they had known each other for ages.

“‘Ska,” he remarked, pointing, then seemed to remember that pointing was not polite and put his hand back on his book. Linda could practically feel him vibrating. 

Not that politeness mattered, though, for Eska stood up (Pizzocchero gekkered and laughed in the silly wheezy was foxes laugh, partly overjoyed by Johan’s presence and partly bothered by the sudden lack of pats), gently took him from Linda's stupefied arms and hugged him tight to his poking rib cage, book and all. The child laughed softly and attempted to embrace him back as best as his little arms could while holding a book nearly twice his size, first trying to latch them around his torso, then deciding around the neck would have been easier. The longer man propped him up with his forearms and swayed him back and forth.

Their reunion was met with perfectly still, absolutely pure, positively dumbfounded silence.

Gonner regained her mobility first: she let her body fall with its whole weight on a nearby chair with such abandon that her back nearly missed its support and made her bang her head right on the ground as she would have fallen flat on the ground.

She merely had the strength to comment: “You have got to be kidding me.” 


End file.
